Remove yourself from Google and Bing
Search engines surface your data, but they don't host it. The lasting fix is removing the source: the broker page publishing your information. The cache clears after that. Here's the right sequence for Google and Bing.
Run my free exposure scan →Why your name is on Google in the first place
Google and Bing don't hold your data; they index it. Your name appears in search results because a data broker published a page about you first. A search engine crawled that page, indexed it, and now serves it to anyone who searches your name.
That's why asking Google to remove a result, without removing the broker page behind it, doesn't hold. The broker page is still live, so a search engine re-indexes it within weeks. You've cleared one result; the source keeps feeding new ones.
The sequence that actually works:
- Remove the source. Opt out of every broker site publishing your data. See the data-brokers hub.
- Then clear the search-engine cache. Submit removal requests to Google and Bing so the stale URLs drop from results faster than their natural recrawl cycle.
Step two alone is whack-a-mole. Step one alone leaves stale results surfacing for weeks. Together they close the loop. Delist handles the broker layer for you, so you're not filing each opt-out by hand.
Google Search
Google's "Results about you" tool (launched in 2022, expanded since) removes URLs from Search results when they contain specific categories of personal information. Filing is straightforward once your scan gives you the broker URLs.
What Google will remove:
- Home address, phone, email
- Government ID numbers (SSN, license, passport)
- Bank or credit-card numbers
- Login credentials
- Confidential medical or health records
- Sexually explicit images posted without consent
- Doxxing content posted with intent to harass
What Google won't remove: opinions, criticism, public-records info from official government sources, legitimate news context.
Use our Google removal helper →Full step-by-step guide →
Bing
Microsoft's Bing offers a content removal request tool covering similar categories to Google: personal contact info, identifiers, financial info, and non-consensual images.
The tool lives in Bing Webmaster Tools. It asks for more documentation than Google's flow and generally takes longer to act.
Bing's index also feeds DuckDuckGo, Yahoo Search, and Ecosia. A successful Bing removal usually clears those downstream engines too.
File the Bing request in parallel with your Google request. There's no reason to wait.
Open Bing's removal tool →DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia, Brave Search
Most of these don't have their own removal tools — they don't need to. They license results from Google's or Bing's index, so a successful removal at those two engines propagates automatically:
- DuckDuckGo: primarily Bing-indexed.
- Yahoo Search: Bing-indexed.
- Ecosia: Bing-indexed.
- Brave Search: its own independent index, with its own removal form.
Two independent indexers worth knowing about: Yandex and Baidu run their own crawlers and don't reliably honor US removal requests. Not worth the time for most people unless you have a specific reason to care about visibility there.
How Delist handles the search layer
Delist's primary work is the broker layer: filing removals at the sites that publish your data. That's where the exposure lives. Search-engine cleanup follows:
- Once a broker has been opted out, if Google is still surfacing the stale URL, we submit a Google removal request.
- For high-priority exposures like an address, phone, or SSN in obvious doxxing content, we file with both Google and Bing.
- When new URLs surface under your name later, we treat them as new broker exposures: opt out at the source first, then clear the cache.
Find the source, then clear the results
A free scan finds the broker URLs appearing under your name, the same list you need for the Google and Bing removal forms. Start there.
Start your free exposure scan →